RM Sales Grow at Alamy . . .
Stock Asylum Staff Report
April 10, 2006
With royalty-free prices on the rise at Alamy, it appears that the company's
customers are giving rights-managed work another look.
Figures reported by Alamy on this date indicate the percentage of revenues collected from rights-managed licensing has climbed slowly but steadily at the company over the last two years.
The British stock photography distributor said rights-managed sales accounted for 59 percent of its revenues in the fourth quarter of 2005, an increase of four percentage points over the same period in 2004 and a six point jump over the first half of 2004.
The Alamy numbers also reflect a possibly related two-year pricing trend – lower average prices for rights-managed images and higher average prices for royalty-free images.
In fact, the average price for a royalty-free image at Alamy jumped to $206 in the final quarter of 2005, which was $36 more than the $170 average price of a rights-managed image.
Compare this to the first half of of 2004 when an average royalty-free license at Alamy cost just $139 while an average rights-managed license came to $183.
In other words, between the first half of 2004 and the last quarter of 2005, the price of an average rights-managed image license dropped $13 while the price of an average royalty-free license climbed $67, which may have given some buyers the incentive they needed to consider licensing a rights-managed image instead of a royalty-free product.
Being privately held, Alamy does not provide regular financial statements with complete quarterly and annual numbers. As such, it is not known how many sales the company makes, how much it collects in total revenues or what its profit/loss picture looks like.
However, the company has recently been offering some interesting figures about pricing, sales trends, and the quantity of images provided by contributors.
The company continues to make its strongest showing in the editorial market with 65 percent of revenues coming from editorial licenses and 35 percent from commercial sales. Alamy has consistently collected 60 percent or more of its revenues from editorial buyers during the last two years.
Rights-managed imagery licensed to commercial buyers averaged $359 per image during the fourth quarter of 2005, the lowest figure in two years and a significant drop from the previous quarter when the average was $425.
However, the decline from the fourth quarter of 2004 was not as significant. In that quarter, commercial buyers paid an average of $381 for a rights-managed image. This also was a large drop from the $427 average in the third quarter of 2004, which suggests the possibility that, for Alamy, commercial license buying patterns in fourth quarters might be different from third quarter buying patterns.
On the editorial side, Alamy said an average rights-managed image sold for $131 during the fourth quarter of 2005, exactly the same amount as in the third quarter and down $3 from the same period the previous year.
The collection continues to grow rapidly, with 435,789 rights-managed and 209,019 royalty-free images uploaded to the online library in the fourth quarter of 2005. This was up considerably from the same period in 2004 when 267,920 rights-managed and 133,924 royalty-free images were uploaded.
Photographers contributed considerably more rights-managed work, but less royalty-free imagery, than agencies. In the fourth quarter of 2005, photographers supplied a two-year high of 291,356 rights-managed images, compared to 144,423 from distributors.
On the other hand, distributors supplied 125,405 new royalty-free images during the quarter, compared to the 83,614 royalty-free images from photographers. Similar trends are evident throughout the two-year period reported by Alamy with the exception of the third quarter of 2005 when photographers supplied more royalty-free images than distributors.
Interestingly, the number of agencies submitting imagery has remained roughly constant with 161 providing images in the last quarter of 2005. Alamy said 159 agencies supplied images during the same period of 2004. The company said 179 agencies contributed imagery in the third quarter of 2005.
However, the number of individual photographers submitting images grew considerably, from 1,692, in the fourth quarter of 2004, to 2,452 during the same period of 2005.
In the fourth quarter of 2005, Stock distributors accounted for 60 percent of the revenues collected by Alamy, despite the fact that individual photographers consistently provided more imagery during the last two years. This could be because distributors pre-edit the work they provide, filtering out some less-saleable images that photographers would include.
The gap is narrowing, however. Images from distributors accounted for 64 percent of revenues during the fourth quarter of 2004 and 67 percent of revenues during the first half of 2004.
The Alamy web site is at: http://www.alamy.com
To download a PDF of Alamy's figures: click here
